New Relic, a cloud based software monitoring company, launched an analytics tool called Insights under the theory that most enterprise data already resides in applications you already have.

Think of New Relic's Insights effort as a big data spin with a nod to small data problems. Let's get real: Before we start talking about using unstructured data, streams and other information from every place it would be nice if companies could readily get to the information they already have.

In a nutshell, New Relic's software sends agents through enterprise applications and then stores the information and presents it in real-time via its SQL-like query language.

Speaking at the GigaOm Structure Data conference in New York, New Relic CEO Lew Cirne said Insights, now in beta, will provide a "real time conversation with your software not a snapshot."

New Relic Insights in many ways serves as a front end to the company's broader analytics portfolio that includes event monitoring and performance management for applications, operational intelligence, infrastructure management and business optimization. Insights is likely to broaden New Relic's market.

As for the beta program, New Relic is targeting product management groups, marketing and sales teams, application developers and IT and customer loyalty functions in enterprises.

New Relic added that 275 customers participated in the private beta and paying customers get access for free for a limited time. Under the trial program, each account gets 1 billion metrics stored up to seven days.

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic. He was most recently Executive Editor of News and Blogs at ZDNet. Prior to that he was executive news editor at eWeek and news editor at Baseline. He also served as the East Coast news editor and finance editor at CN...
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